


How to Make a Mask

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-10
Updated: 2012-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-05 02:45:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/401599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Johanna Mason is more complicated than she would like to let on. There are parts of her no one ever sees anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Make a Mask

Johanna knows all about masks. Her father makes them, out of scrap pieces of wood that he brings home, whittling shapes out of lumps, sanding them down, smoothing them into perfect, beautiful things. It is the only beauty they have some days, except for the woods, all green and crisp and clean, and she loves holding them. It's the only beauty she can hold in her hands.

Her grandfather tells her that's not true, and he holds her hands to her face, and she laughs, and she puts on a mask that her father made, and her mother smiles. They're at home. This is the only place they can do this, because smiling's not something you do when you're at work, sawing trees, driving the big rigs that tow the lumber away, whittling big pieces into smaller ones with heavy axes. And there is no smiling on days like today, when Johanna sits and squirms and watches as someone gets called, as someone gets wishes for the odds to be in their favor, as her mother cries even though it's no one they know.

Or maybe her mother cries _because_ it's no one they know. Johanna is eleven. She only has one more year.

*****

The fact is that Johanna is lucky. She's lucky because both her parents work, and her grandfather is still alive and his eyesight is more than good enough to drive the big rigs, and because her family has a gift for knowing how trees will fall, Johanna especially. She can squint up into the canopy and tell the men underneath that it'll fall this way or that, to watch the other trees, to clear the saplings in that way, first. They all work, so they all eat. It's not always enough - Johanna knows what it's like to be hungry - but it's more than enough to keep Johanna from needing tessarae. She doesn't have any siblings, she doesn't need to protect anyone but her parents, and they're the ones who do all the protecting.

And because she's lucky, people think she's a little strange; aloof, guarded. At work her father watches over her, doesn't let any of the boys her age get too close. At school she eats with one friend one day, maybe another the next, but never with anyone more than once a week, spreading her acquaintances thinly. She doesn't need anyone else. She has her family, and that's more than enough for Johanna.

It's also one of the things that is in her favor, the day of the reaping when she's sixteen, and like a shot to her system, her name gets called. She feels like she can't breathe, standing in the group of girls her age, her fists clenching. How could this happen? How could she be called? She only has five name slips where some girls have _forty_ , she's never been unlucky, not in life, not in love, not in anything. She's never hurt anyone, ever. Johanna categorizes her sins and they don't add up in her head, they just don't make any sense. She doesn't want to go. She doesn't want to die.

There are no friends when she goes into the small room to meet her family before she leaves. Her mother is crying, she can't even speak, and her grandfather is quiet as he holds her hands. They sit there like that for a long time before her father, who has always been there to protect her, her father who has always watched out for boys getting too close steps up to sit beside her. "Johanna," he says, "remember what you know about masks." 

The words are cryptic and that's annoying, and Johanna is about to open her mouth and say so when he reaches over to hold her, his big arms around her, and she presses her face into his shoulder. "And come back," he adds after a minute, as if the words mean more when they're spoken. "That boy," he adds, and she knows he means Sycamore, her fellow tribute, "does he know anything about you?"

Johanna shakes her head against her father's shoulder. He's younger than she is by a year, they never spent time in school together, or at work. They know of each other. That's about it. "Don't let him," her father says, and Johanna nods, and he slips a token into her hand, a small whittled bead, round and smooth and perfect, with just the slightest indentation on one end where Johanna's thumb fits perfectly as it that's what it was for. There's a leather thong around it, and after her family leaves she ties it around her wrist and draws it to her bottom lip, running the indentation over the skin, feeling it move. The wood is warm and comforting while Johanna lays in her bed on the train, staring into the darkness, and thinking about masks.

*****

This is what Johanna doesn't know.

She doesn't know that the day she's on Parade in the Capitol, dressed frustratingly like a tree like ever District 7 tribute before her (and long after her), her father and her grandfather are holding a meeting they shouldn't be holding. She doesn't know, the night she's speaking with Caesar Flickerman, breathless and meek about how she's never hurt a fly and gets sick everytime something dies out in those big woods in District 7 that her father and her grandfather are whispering words while everyone in District 7 packs into the square to watch. She doesn't know that, when she's pretending she can't lift an axe in training and sloppily handling the other weapons that her father and her grandfather are putting on masks of their own in front of the Peacekeepers who oversee their work on a daily basis.

She doesn't know, as she runs through the desert of the arena she's stuck in, discovering new things about subtle rise in terrain, learning about irritating plants that look fuzzy but are actually covered in prickly exploding spines, killing Sycamore and others, her axe always sure about how someone will fall, that her grandfather is caught and hung in front of the screen where she is projected, fighting for her life.

*****

This is what Johanna does know.

She knows that there are only three tributes left - the boy from District 4 and the girl from District 2, and herself. They were both part of the career pack but they split up long ago, and they hadn't been paying attention to Johanna Mason, the girl who couldn't hold a spear in training. But Johanna knows all about masks and this past few weeks has been one mask on top of the other - she killed her ally while they were sleeping, a girl from District 11, and Johanna's thoughts about her were very uncharitable at the time. She was a twit. They're all twits. The Careers, in her opinion, are the worst, too big, too muscley, and way too into this. Johanna hates killing but she'll do it, she's done it, and the best part is that the two idiots who have been tracking each other, former allies who think they have this in the bag, they're not worried about little Johanna who they've never seen hurt anyone, just run.

They're all standing in the same place and they all have a weapon, but the boy from District 4 has a spear that he could use like a trident (who does he think he is, Johanna scoffs, Finnick Odair?) and he tells her, "I'll get you next, weakling."

Johanna feels the rage in her gut but she pretends to hide behind a cactus, gaining just enough space to make them think that she ran away as they fight. The girl from 2 slashes his face open, and he growls and spears her, and pulls the spear out of the dying girl just in time to see Johanna's axe spinning right for his face. The cannon shot booms, and Johanna walks leisurely over to pull it out and kneel next to 2, who is still dying, and _still_ trying to win, her hands scrabbling for her knives, which Johanna kneels next to her and takes one in her hand, raising her eyebrows before she slices the girl's throat open.

The cannon shot fires, and all that Johanna feels is a deep, empty hole where the relief should be. Even the announcement of her winning, the hovercraft picking her up, the team of doctors making she she's whole (they have to clean up several wounds, including a number gotten from cactus, and she needs medicine for an infected scorpion bite that she managed to not let kill her by cutting most of the bite away, plus the dehydration and the 'full body polish' that Johanna would have preferred to not have, but she doesn't have a choice) for her coronation in a few days.

She sits in her chair and talks to Caesar Flickerman about her strategy and watches the review and all she really wants is to go home. Finally the interview begins to die down, and Caesar asks, "So now that you're going home, what do you plan to do first?"

"Sleep," Johanna says honestly, and the audience laughs like it's a joke.

She doesn't know that it is a joke until she gets home and her father tells her that her grandfather who used to hold her face in his hands and say it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever held had a heart attack.

*****

Johanna wishes that she could say that the games didn't change her, but that would be a lie. She feels hard, like someone's pressed her into fossilized wood, smashed so long and so hard that she's turned to stone. She doesn't recognize herself in the mirror, so sometimes, around the house, she'll put on a mask and lie on her bed and roll the wooden bead of her token over her bottom lip, over and over. Without work and without school, she doesn't know what to do with herself so she begins to look for a talent.

It's what's expected, although Johanna really doesn't like what's expected anymore. She fights with her father, which never used to happen, and she's not sure _why_ , except that there's something hard inside her chest that she can't push out. One day her mother catches her with a mask over her face and she sits down next to her on the bed. "We should talk, Jo," she says, using a nickname no one else uses.

Johanna lies there, and her eyes flick over to glimpse at her mother. "Yeah?"

"Something happened to you," her mother says, her voice soft. It's like the voice she uses on people who aren't pulling their weight at the worksite. It's the voice that says shape up without being mean about it. It's the voice that Johanna imitated to keep people from looking at her during the Games. "I know you've been through a lot..."

"I killed people," Johanna says bluntly. She doesn't want to have this conversation. She doesn't want to talk about this. "That's what changed, mom. I _killed_ people."

"You don't smile anymore," her mother says.

"Well, I don't see anything to smile about, do you?" Johanna wants to smack her mother on the head. What is there to smile over? There's nothing _good_ about what happened during the games, there's nothing good about it except that she came _back_ and now they live in a fancy house and she doesn't have to do anything with her time except wear masks and get fat. Maybe take some morphling, or drink. She certainly wouldn't be the first, or the last Victor to do so. There's nothing good about District 7 or her grandfather's death, or the way that she and her father can't sit in the same room. The Capitol changed her. She's changed, even though she didn't want to. "Go away," she says.

Her mother takes the mask off her face. "I just want to see your face again."

Johanna frowns. "That was all the face I had the ability to give you."

*****

Snow doesn't even wait an hour after Johanna's train pulls up into the station to corner her in her apartment. The thing is that Johanna sits there and listens to him talk about helping each other. "Do you know who Haymitch Abernathy is?"

Of course Johanna knows. Everyone knows who Haymitch Abernathy is. He's the sad lone victor from District 12, the pathetic wastecase who manages to make a scene at least once every single games for the populace to laugh over. He's a comic genius, or a total loser, Johanna hasn't decided which. "Sure," she says breezily. _Wear a mask_ , she tells herself in her father's voice. Snow scares her to the core right at this moment, smelling like he does.

"He didn't help me. And then his family paid the price." Snow's lips are ridiculous, Johanna suddenly realizes, even though she hears the threat, and understands it. 

She takes a moment to consider this. "What do you want me to do?" she asks, her eyebrows raised.

"There's a man who wants to escort you to the banquet being held for you tonight," he tells her, drawing a picture out of his front pocket. The man is older, but Johanna can't tell much beyond that. In the Capitol, he could be any age. He could be ancient and have had so many alterations that make him look young, or he could look his true age. He's not terribly offensive, though.

"Is that all?" Johanna is a little surprised. This seems...benign. Go on a date? She's seventeen, she's never been on one because before she wasn't allowed and after she was in no shape, but be escorted by someone from the Capitol is only offensive in that she might have to touch his arm. "Sure." 

Snow smiles, and Johanna thinks he looks like a scorpion, with a hidden tail all ready to lash out and sting her.

And the man, he isn't so offensive, not at first. He seems honestly delighted by her company, and Johanna doesn't mind that, except she really doesn't want him to touch her skin. They dance and they dine and Johanna eats but the hole left over from the games is still there, and she wears a mask that smiles right up until the point the car they're in doesn't take her home, and she protests. "Excuse me," she says, "But I'm tired, I'm not going to another party."

"I was thinking we could have a glass of wine at my apartment," the man (whose name Johanna forgets that instant, because she doesn't want to remember it, now that she's sussing out what this 'date' is) "And then you can go home."

"I don't think so," Johanna says, and steel bites into her voice. Are people that stupid? To think that you can take someone who killed five people home and think it's safe? Do Citizens of the Capitol keep snakes in their beds, too? "Take me back now." She doesn't add a please, because she doesn't want to. The mask is off. There are no more smiles.

The man does smile, though, indulgently, as though she's said something funny or clever. She's getting angry, and when he moves in to kiss her, as if to placate her, she slaps him across the face. 

Suddenly he's not smiling anymore. Suddenly he looks afraid, because it's as if he's just realized just who is in his car with him, who is looking at him, who wants him to die.

He drives her back home.

In the morning, Snow sends her a picture of her father, hanging in the square.

*****

Johanna makes her own masks, now. She doesn't play Capitol games; she told her mother why her father died, and her mother screamed at her, called her unnatural, told her the reason that her grandfather died ( _For you, Jo, for you_ ) called her ungrateful, then held her, held her until they both fell asleep in Johanna's bed.

She was gone the next morning. They are good with forests, the people of District 7. She left Johanna a note, telling her that it's better if Johanna doesn't have anyone they can hurt. That she should destroy this note. That she loves her.

Johanna makes masks.

But she never wears one again.


End file.
